The Blog of Curtis Chambers

What is the future of identity? As society continues to grow ever more large, proving that you are you is becoming more of a problem every day. We have so many numbers that identify us now, such as social security, phone, credit card and bank account numbers, that it makes me wonder if there’s not a better way to handle this whole problem. It’s really not a scalable solution.

Traditionally, in small communities this wasn’t an issue as there weren’t enough people to have unknown community members. This is still the case in small towns where everyone knows everyone. But now with the urban population exceeding the rural population for the first time in human history, we’re having the inverse problem of everyone knowing virtually no one in their community. Think about it…how many people in your apartment complex do you really know? How many people that live on your block do you know?

Banks used to know their customers by name and now we’re just numbers. Now that numbers can be spoofed they’re looking into biometrics such as fingerprint and retina scans. But it’s only a matter of time until those become spoofed as well, and then what? At least with numbers we can just make up a new one once our identity is compromised. Are they going to issue us new fingers and eyeballs?

For quite some time I’ve been recommending my Windows programming brethren to use TortoiseSVN as the GUI for version control with Subversion, and despite my hatred for Windows I’ve always been very jealous of their ability to have right-click access to their SVN repositories via Windows Explorer.  Ever since I’ve been using OS X, I’ve been doing things the hard way and only using the command-line Subversion tools.

But now that’s all changed!  Just yesterday I discovered SCPlugin, which gives Mac users the same right-click shell access to SVN that Windows users have.  Apparently I’m behind the times as this has been out for awhile, but it was still new and exciting for me.

Thanks to Google’s new “swallow up every business that sort of relates to something we do” business strategy, FeedBurner’s MyBrand service is now free to everyone.  It probably won’t matter to most people, but to anyone that runs a site with RSS feeds it will provide great value.  It basically allows you to get all the advantages of FeedBurner, but without sacrificing your domain name on your feeds URLs.

I know that sometimes when I use Google Reader to search and subscribe to feeds, there’s one for the site itself and a separate FeedBurner one, and I never really know which one to pick.  Hopefully people will start using this service and eliminate that problem as well.

I tend to be a pretty private person, so starting this blog will be an interesting experiment for me in terms of branching out beyond my typical comfort zone.

I was actually inspired to do this one night after leaving The Living Room in Point Loma.  There’s an older gentleman that frequents the shop most nights, perhaps in his 60’s, and he just comes in and uses the Internet until they close at midnight and then rides his motorcycle off into the distance.

One night we happened to start chatting and got into all kinds of discussions, including things like neuroscience, engineering, technology’s effect on culture and society, and sailboats.  He actually lives on a sailboat and travels all over the world in it and uses his motorcycle to get to places with Internet access so that he can listen to podcasts and watch videos.  Anyway, we just had a really fascinating discussion and made me yearn for more discussion on a wide variety of topics, which is why I started this blog.  I’m hoping it will give me an outlet for my random thoughts and facilitate discussion with my friends worldwide.

This is the first of what I hope to be many posts, so please comment away!